"Permit me to offer my congratulations on your marriage, madame," I said; "I have had no earlier opportunity."
"Forgive me," she gasped. "I have come to beseech your forgiveness! Can you not forget the wrong I did you?"
"Do I look as if I had forgotten?"
"I was inconstant, cruel, I cannot excuse myself. But, O Silvestre, in the name of the love you once bore me, have pity on us! Reform, abjure your evil courses! Do not, I implore you, condemn my husband to this abyss of depravity, do not wreck my married life!" Now I understood what had procured me the honour of a visit from this woman, and I triumphed devilishly that I was the elder twin.
"Madame," I answered, "I think that I owe you no explanations, but I shall say this: the evil courses that you deplore were adopted, not vindictively, but in the effort to numb the agony that you had made me suffer. You but reap as you have sown."
"Reform!" she sobbed. She sank on her knees before me. "Silvestre, in mercy to us, reform!"
"I will never reform," I said inflexibly. "I will grow more abandoned day by day—my past faults shall shine as merits compared with the atrocities that are to come. False girl, monster of selfishness, you are dragging me to the gutter, and your only grief is that he must share my shame! You have blackened my soul, and you have no regret but that my iniquities must react on him! By the shock that stunned him in the first flush of your honeymoon, you know what I experienced when I received the news of your deceit; by the anguish of repentance that overtakes him after each of his orgies, which revolt you, you know that I was capable of being a nobler man. The degradation that you behold is your own work. You have made me bad, and you must bear the consequences—you cannot make me good now to save your husband!"
Humbled and despairing, she left me.
I repeat that it is no part of my confession to palliate my guilt. The sight of her had served merely to inflame my resentment—and it was at this stage that I began deliberately to contemplate revenge.
But not the one that I had threatened. Ah, no! I bethought myself of a vengeance more complete than that. What, after all, were these escapades of his that were followed by contrition, that saw him again and again a penitent at her feet? There should be no more of such trifles; she should be tortured with the torture that she had dealt to me—I would make him adore another woman with all his heart and brain!